SpaceX has published Elon Musk's presentation about colonizing Mars — here's the full transcript and slides

In late September, billionaire and SpaceX founder Elon Musk debuted a fresh plan for colonizing Mars with 1 million people.

The focus of Musk’s new presentation, which updates a 2016 talk he gave at the International Astronautical Congress, was the “Big F—ing Rocket,” or BFR.

Musk told a crowd at the 2017 IAC meeting in Adelaide, Australia, that he hopes to start building the 35-story space vehicle in early 2018, launch the first BFR to Mars in 2022, and use it to land crewed missions on the red planet in 2024 (though he has yet to say how a Martian colony would survive).

After Musk’s talk on September 28, a Reddit user transcribed the full 42-minute-long presentation, and SpaceX published a high-resolution version of Musk’s slides to its Mars website last week, a company spokesperson confirmed with Business Insider.

We’ve edited and appended the new transcript and slides here to reproduce Musk’s detailed presentation in full. If you’re ready to learn a thing or two about rocket science from a tech mogul, keep scrolling.

I’m going to talk more about what it takes to become a multi-planet species. And just a brief refresher on why this is important: I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species than if we’re not.

You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think “the future’s going to be great”. And that’s what being a space-faring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars. That’s why.

So let me go into more detail on becoming a multi-planet species. This is the updated design for the — well, we’re sort of searching for the right name, but the code name, at least, is BFR [Big F—ing Rocket]. Probably the most important thing that I want to convey in this presentation is that I think we have figured out how to pay for it. This is very important.

In last year’s presentation, we were really searching for what the right way… how do we pay for this thing? We went through various ideas, Kickstarter, collecting underpants, these didn’t pan out. But now we think we’ve got a way to do it, which is to have a smaller vehicle — it’s still pretty big — but one that can do everything that’s needed in the greater-Earth-orbit activity. So essentially we want to make our current vehicles redundant. We want to have one system, one booster and ship, that replaces Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon.

If we can do that, then all the resources that are used for Falcon 9, Heavy, and Dragon can be applied to this system. That’s really fundamental.